Martin Scorsese: 'Cinema is gone'

Good on you Marty, keep speaking the truth and fighting the good fight. Before anyone goes on to say that he's just an old, bitter man ... Please, do realize that he is not necessarily talking about European or Asian cinema. This is a sly aim at Marvel and Disney. The way they are running things these days does indeed signify the end of something in cinema. What exactly? I am not sure, but it isn't anything positive. The way they are trying to monopolize and mass-market their "movies" to the general public is definitely a doomsday for big-studio American filmmaking.Scorsese had this to say to the Associated Press:

"Cinema is gone, the cinema I grew up with and that I'm making, it's gone."

"The theater will always be there for that communal experience, there's no doubt. But what kind of experience is it going to be?" he continues. "Is it always going to be a theme-park movie? I sound like an old man, which I am. The big screen for us in the '50s, you go from Westerns to 'Lawrence of Arabia' to the special experience of '2001' in 1968. The experience of seeing 'Vertigo' and 'The Searchers' in VistaVision."

"It should matter to your life, unfortunately the latest generations don't know that it mattered so much."

"TV, I don't think has taken that place. Not yet, I tried it. I had success to a certain extent. 'Vinyl' we tried but we found that the atmosphere for the type of picture we wanted to make — the nature of the language, the drugs, the sex, depicting the rock 'n' roll world of the '70s — we got a lot of resistance. So I don't know about that freedom."

"If the younger people have something to say and they find a way to say through visual means as well as literary, there's the new cinema, I'm worried about double-think or triple-think, which is make you believe you have the freedom, but they can make it very difficult to get the picture shown, to get it made, ruin reputations. It's happened before."

"He wanted to make this film extremely differently from anything out there," says Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese's editor since "Raging Bull. ''He's just tired of slam-bam-crash. Telling the audience what to think is what he really hates. Trying to do a meditative movie at this point, in this insane world we're in now, was incredibly brave. He wanted to stamp the film with that throughout: the pace, the very subtle use of music."

"How many movies start without music at the very beginning under the logos?" she adds. "He said, 'Take out all that big Hollywood.'"